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Friday, February 25, 2011

Harassing Posters in the Classroom

Fellow blogger Izgad was kind enough to allow me to share with you this picture of a posting board that is located in the back of the college classroom where he teaches.

I'm completely incensed by this. In would refuse to teach in this classroom. Then, I would bring one of the administrators to look at the board and ask them to explain why it is OK for me to be harassed in the workplace. Then I would get in touch with the feminist organization on campus and ask them what it is they see as their mission if something this egregious slipped right by them.

I'm sure there will be readers who will not understand what the big deal is and why I find this offensive. Something tells me these readers will be male. So for them, I found the following picture:

How would you like to teach your classes while staring at this the entire time?

The religious brochure or whatever it is is, indeed, annoying. But it doesn't constitute such a blatant issue of harassment.The number of college students who suffer from anorexia and bulimia is staggering. And they have to be further harassed while in class? Like we don't see enough images of almost naked women already.

God, I wish there was a similar amount of images of near-naked men showered on us daily. Then it would be fun to observe how men deal with that.

Pagan Topologist -- I'm not sure, but I think that's a weight-loss poster. I've seen it (or a very similar one) before.

Clarissa, if you have people telling you they 'don't get' why you find the first picture irksome, rest assured most of them won't realise why the second picture is relevant to the first.

The people who won't find the first picture worrying will be people who still function within received gendered expectations. For them, it falls on women to be petite and pretty to be attractive, and on men to be financially or professionally successful.

In this paradigm, beautiful young men are not serious threats, or in any way capable of inducing insecurity and self-doubt, because young men have not had the time to acquire male traditional social capital: money and power. And they don't worry about their sexual performance either, because in that paradigm, women don't enjoy sex. They lie back and think of England. So the male performance index is irrelevant.

So yes, I have a feeling your point will be missed by those that disagree with you to begin with.

I don't know how else to make the point, Rimi. I think you might be right but I simply have no idea how to make this any clearer.

One gets used to seeing female body parts in various state of undress everywhere one goes. But to have no refuge from this in the classroom?? It is beyond insulting that this would even happen, and that I still need to think of ways to convince people of this.